


exactly where i want to be

by Lymans



Category: Veep (TV)
Genre: Amy and Dan as parents, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 01:51:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13044030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lymans/pseuds/Lymans
Summary: Five years on and Dan and Amy are a pretty great parenting team.A snapshot of a morning in the Brookheimer-Egan household.





	exactly where i want to be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kindness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kindness/gifts).



> I'm behind on Veep and I haven't written in ages so I apologise for the overuse of parenthesis and any incorrect Veep facts but I couldn't not write Dan and Amy in the future. Veep would never go this cloyingly sweet but it's almost Christmas and Amy's pregnant.

If someone had told Amy five years ago that her life would be what it is today, she would have either laughed in their face or demanded they be escorted from the premises on the grounds of insanity. Yet, here she was, sat at her kitchen island listening to her four-year-old daughter read while Dan simultaneously battled with the coffee pot and pacified Senator McGee about today’s vote on the hill.

And yes, Amy was also messaging Mike to confirm he’d got statements ready for both possible outcomes depending on which way Pierce and Greene decided to swing but she was still half listening to Charlotte and correcting her pronunciation of your (“Not your like hour; your like-…” She paused to think of a rhyme more suitable than whore.

“Four,” Dan chimed in, drumming his fingers as he waited for either the coffee to be ready or McGee to stop ranting at him.).

Honestly, on reflection, if someone had told her five years ago that her life would involve non-negotiable family breakfasts, morning reading sessions, a small child she didn’t want to kill, and Dan Egan anywhere near her home making breakfast, she would definitely have had said person arrested for being deranged.

It wasn’t as if Amy or Dan have fundamentally changed in the last half a decade. She was still pretty sure she loathed him at least 35% of the time (a dramatic decrease from the 80% she felt when she first peed on that pregnancy test), they both cursed far more than was socially acceptable outside of DC (it had been a fun Christmas when two-year-old Charlotte had loudly exclaimed, “Shit!” at the dinner table when Amy’s dad had spilt the gravy), and they still hated snotty, bratty, loud children.

However, Charlotte Selina Brookheimer-Egan (thus named because her daughter deserved to reap the benefits of having two politically influential parents, and also for the perplexed and horrified look on Jonah’s face every time he heard her full name. It had nothing to do with Amy being at all sentimental when Dan held their daughter for the first time. She didn’t get sentimental; the tears stinging in her eyes were purely down to the hormones raging through her body and the eighteen hours of labour she had just endured) was neither snotty nor bratty nor particularly loud. While Dan refused to hold his brother’s newborn baby – “this is a four-thousand-dollar suit and I’m not getting it covered in baby vomit” – and Amy complained to the maître d’ every time some idiotic parent thought it was acceptable to bring their toddler to dinner at a 5* restaurant, they had both discovered the ability to be completely enthralled by their daughter.

When Amy had discovered she was pregnant, she had run through the full gauntlet of emotions from furiously smashing the three-hundred-dollar vase her mother had bought her to crying in the bathroom at work. For the first three weeks, she had had her heart set on an abortion but she had never been able to bring herself to go through with it, so she had decided to keep “the stupid kid.”

The reality was that said stupid kid had turned out to be pretty awesome if she did say so herself, especially whenever she reminded “Uncle Jonah” about his failed presidential run. She had been an ideal baby, only waking in the night for a two am feed and actually allowing Amy to get some work done while she napped during the day, and now she was growing into a smart and funny little girl who was more like her father than Amy cared to admit.

“Okay Lottie, time to get dressed,” Dan said, sliding the bowl of half-eaten Cheerios away from her and tugging the book from her grasp.

“One more page,” she asked, blinking up at him with the same big blue eyes that she had inherited from Amy.

It constantly surprised the DC collective that Dan Egan, chief of staff to Senator McGee and known dickhead, could be so easily swayed by a small child with blonde hair and blue eyes. Though interruptions during meetings tended to end with the incompetent intern being on the receiving end of a curse-filled tirade from Dan, a message from his daughter’s forty-thousand-dollar-a-year PreK teacher always ended with him excusing himself from the meeting without a second thought. And the sight of him at the annual staff summer BBQ with Charlotte clinging to his back, sticky hands messing up his carefully styled hair as she shared her ice-cream with him, had caused more gossip amongst the staff than anything he’d ever done in his working hours.

“Not a chance,” he said, lifting her up off the chair and throwing her over his shoulder, causing her to squeal loudly and clutch at his shirt.

“She’s going to ruin your suit, you know.”

“Worth it,” he grinned, tickling the little girl and carrying her towards the stairs, leaving Amy alone in the kitchen as the pair’s laughter echoed behind them.

Sometimes the reality that Dan Egan was a good father, a brilliant one in fact, still took her by surprise. For most of her pregnancy, they had kept their distance from each other and allowed DC’s rumour mill to go into overdrive about the possible identity of her baby daddy. Dan had offered her whatever money she might need, she had turned him down, and that had been that. That was until halfway through the sixth month of pregnancy when she had gone to the toilet and found blood in her underwear. It had been Dan who had taken one look at her blanched face and ordered an Uber to take them to the hospital, ignoring the fact they were supposed to be leading a donors’ brunch in fifteen minutes. Neither of them had said a word the entire journey but he had held her hand so tightly that his knuckles had turned white and she never asked him to let go. He hadn’t in fact until the moment the doctor confirmed that the bleeding was due to a low-lying placenta and that their baby was absolutely fine.

After that, he was around far more often, whether it was putting together the crib in her spare bedroom or allowing her to curse at him as the baby used her bladder as a bouncy castle. It became an unwritten rule that neither of them questioned the change or what it meant, but when Amy’s waters had broken in the middle of a briefing with DC’s leading pollsters, Dan had been the first person she had demanded Gary call. And when he hadn’t left her side during the eighteen hours of excruciating labour, even as she swore at him so violently that even their doctor blushed, she had never been so grateful to have him and his stupid face around.

From the moment Charlotte arrived, Dan was around all the time, and more than once she had questioned whether he’d been replaced with an alternate version of himself as he changed diapers, and how exactly had she found herself managing two am feeds with Dan fucking Egan? Dan Egan who had fucked her sister and who always had the most irritating smirk on his face was now someone she found herself relying on and, god damn it, needing. He was the one that talked her down when she worried she was doing a shitty job at being a mom and he was the one who offered to stay up in the hotel room with a colicky baby just so she could be on the floor when Selina accepted the Democratic nomination for president. Somehow, insanely, Dan Egan had become her person, and if that meant he’d been sleeping on her pull-out bed for the last four months then so be it.

Of course, being Dan and Amy meant that their platonic co-parenting slash roommates who definitely don’t want to have sex arrangement could only last for so long, and when she cursed him out in front of two of DC’s most ruthless journalists, Selina had all but dragged her from the conference room and demanded she “bang his brains out or punch him. Either one will work but do one of them, Amy, before you kill each other.” It had only taken another week for them to fuck against the kitchen counter while Charlotte slept, and only five months of no strings attached ‘this is just sex and definitely nothing else even if the sight of you with our daughter is ridiculously attractive’ sex for them to reluctantly admit that maybe they did make a pretty good team and maybe they did kind of have feelings for each other after all.

Three and a half years later and their team was still pretty damn good. As Amy finished off a slice of toast and put Charlotte’s snack into her backpack while resisting the urge to respond to Mike’s thirteenth text with a reminder than ‘even a fucking incompetent intern could complete this task so stop bothering me with inane questions someone who’s never even read a bill could answer,’ she listened to her daughter’s giggles from upstairs. She knew Dan would eventually win the battle because he was finally starting to build up immunity to a pleading gaze from Charlotte (though Amy still found her own to be particularly effective), and their daughter would come downstairs in her fancy prep school uniform. It was the same way she knew that Dan would get the remaining few senators on McGee’s team and drive through the education bill he’d been slaving over for the past four months and the same way she knew she’d be the one to get to lead the next step of Selina’s educational reform vision after their win.

Dan and Amy were a good team, a great team, and life really was easier now they were on the same side. They were raising a daughter who was going to grow up to be ridiculously brilliant and between the two of them they had the Democratic Party at their beck and call. Late at night, Dan had begun discussing the possibility of a Senate run in Amy’s future when Selina’s presidency was over once and for all, and though she continued to brush off the idea, she couldn’t stop the small thrill than ran through her each time she allowed herself to consider what her campaign would look like with Dan at the helm and Charlotte cheering her on.

There was a thundering of footsteps and then a small blonde hurricane hurled herself at Amy, hugging her legs tightly.

“Love you, mommy,” she whispered, and Amy felt her heart soar.

She bent down to hug her daughter back.

“Love you too.”

“And daddy?” Charlotte asked, wiggling free from the hug before grabbing her backpack and rushing to hold Dan’s waiting hand.

He scooped her up and hugged her. “Daddy loves you too.”

“And daddy loves mummy?” she asked, pulling him towards the door and the start of their day where Dan would drop her off at school and Amy would prepare for the daily White House briefing.

Yes, five years ago, this would have all been absurd to Amy. But as Dan whispered in her ear that he loved her and kissed her slowly before allowing their whirlwind of a child to drag them out of the door, chattering about the farm animals that were going to be visiting her class today, Amy figured she was pretty lucky to have two such amazing people on her team. It wasn’t the future she had imagined for herself, not even close, but as her daughter waved frantically at her from the back of Dan’s car and she allowed herself to begin the switch from mom mode to work mode, she couldn’t feel anything but grateful for that drunken night five years ago and everything it had brought her.


End file.
